History
The Auckland Gas Company was formed in 1862 as the first joint stock company in New Zealand. It was also the first private services provider in Auckland. In the 1870s, the company bought and developed a large site in Freemans Bay to build a gasworks (roughly on and east of the site of the current New World supermarket), with further buildings (mainly workshops) and offices on Beaumont Street.
In the late 1960s the Kapuni gas fields were openened, providing natural gas which was cleaner and cheaper than the locally produced coal gas variant, and the company stopped producing gas and became a supplier only. This led to most of the buildings in the Freemans Bay are being demolished.
Read more about this topic: Auckland Gas Company
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“The History of the world is not the theatre of happiness. Periods of happiness are blank pages in it, for they are periods of harmony—periods when the antithesis is in abeyance.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)
“Every generation rewrites the past. In easy times history is more or less of an ornamental art, but in times of danger we are driven to the written record by a pressing need to find answers to the riddles of today.... In times of change and danger when there is a quicksand of fear under men’s reasoning, a sense of continuity with generations gone before can stretch like a lifeline across the scary present and get us past that idiot delusion of the exceptional Now that blocks good thinking.”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)
“The history is always the same the product is always different and the history interests more than the product. More, that is, more. Yes. But if the product was not different the history which is the same would not be more interesting.”
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)